Because of the space we write about here at Social Media Explorer, one question we’re consistently asked is, “What’s the best social media management software to use for my business?” The problem, as we’ve discussed before, is that social media management and monitoring platforms all do different things with varying degrees of sophistication. None of them do everything you want them to do and most of them do the big two or three things (publishing, engagement and measurement) about the same.

We’ve recently begun researching the online conversation around these management tools for a client and haven’t found much more than a whole lot of Tweets saying X tool is great or Y tool sucks. There’s not a lot of discussion online about social media management solutions, especially for small to medium businesses. So we’d like to invite that discussion here.

For those of you who use and like any of the following software solutions, or even similar ones we’ve left out, we’d like for you to dive into the comments and tell us a few things. Those questions are also listed below. First, we’re looking for users of software platforms classified as social media management tools (we’re classifying them liberally) like:

And here are the questions we’d like you to address. Feel free to answer one or all, depending upon your interest and time. We’d just love to host a discussion here where people looking for a solution can see some honest assessments from actual users. The questions:

What do you like about the software you’re using?

What do you not like about the software you’re using?

Are you using more than one of the management or publishing solutions and why?

What other business softwares does your system integrate with and do you use that integration?

What other business software would it be helpful for your platform to integrate with that it doesn’t?

How easy is your software to learn and use?

How easy is your software to manage from an admin standpoint?

How many people in your organization are using the software?

Feel free to add other thoughts. I’m hoping this post becomes like a forum thread that just lives on and on and is useful for months and years to come. So? Dive in. The comments are yours.

About the Author

Jason Falls

Jason Falls is the founder of Social Media Explorer and one of the most notable and outspoken voices in the social media marketing industry. He is a noted marketing keynote speaker, author of two books and unapologetic bourbon aficionado. He can also be found at JasonFalls.com.

The one thing I’d like to see is a monitoring tool that includes Facebook (which I found only once), but that only includes fan pages- for the primary reason that if someone posts something on their personal page, I might be able to see it, but I cannot engage with them. It’s not nearly as valuable- but if I could track just fan pages (ie. where I could engage)- that would be valuable to us.

I work in a newsroom and we all love Social News Desk. As producers, we get bogged down with stuff to do, so one of the biggest features we like about SND is the ability to schedule posts. We also like the reminders from the product that tell us when it’s been a while since we’ve posted. And because this time is customizable, it works for any newsroom.

Additionally, it helps us manage all of our talent pages – from the main station page to anchor and reporter pages. On Twitter, you can see what’s trending. On Facebook, you can see how much TRUE interaction there is with content — not just number of fans. It helps us know what our realistic reach is — not just the idealistic total fan count. Influence is better than raw numbers. Station managers can leave us notes within the product and if we forget to post a picture or link or even spell check, it reminds us before posting. You can even create quizzes for fans to take — with “hints” all linking back to pages on the station website, meaning page clicks. There are also customizable ad opportunities.

As time has gone on, Social News Desk has become more and more integrated into our newsroom equipment and I guarantee you the top-notch team behind the product is working to make it even more easier for us to access it. They’re also quick to respond to any issues or questions we may have, as few as they are. The product is easy to learn for anyone who has a remote knowledge of social media and the Internet. As a manager of the product, it’s super easy to set up new users and teach them the basics in 5-10 minutes. At this point, I’d say there are at least a few dozen people using the product at work and all seem to enjoy their experience.

One tool I can’t live without for my social media marketing is Strutta. It features a suite of amazing apps that you can use to engage your fans on Twitter, increase leads, and run pretty fantastic contests. I wrote a post about the platform here and I definitely recommend you take a look and consider using it:

I hate to be another one chiming in about providers that were not on the list (because I know it’s tough to put together an exhaustive list) but I’d like to add Strutta to the list when it comes to engagement apps for Facebook. Strutta bridges the gap between the no-frills “cookie cutter” apps platforms and the high cost of a platform like Buddy Media. We have an entry level product at $99/month for SMBs and a robust Pro solution that has been utilized by major international brands and agencies.

We recognize that apps is only one part of the engagement equation and are actively working on partnering with other solution providers to provide clients with a full set of tools to manage their social campaigns.

We just purchased a subscription to HubSpot, but we also looked at other tools like Awareness Networks (which is another good one).

For us, it all came down to the peripheral benefits, such as SEO assistance and e-mail marketing tools.

In terms of monitoring, there’s one thing I haven’t been able to find anywhere- a tool that includes Facebook as part of its monitoring, but that ONLY includes fan pages. The reason for this is that I cannot engage with private individuals on their personal pages if we are not friends, so there’s limited value there, BUT I would love to know if, say the NY Times Facebook page ran a story of interest to us so we could engage. Does anyone know of a tool that does this?

Great question. If (and this is a big IF) the brand page in question is set to be publicly viewable (all are by default) and the individual pieces of content on the page are set to be publicly viewable (which they are by default, but Facebook has done a good job of showing people how to change this in light of Google+ and its Circles functionality) then that content can be indexed and seen by search engines and people off of Facebook. (As I understand the Page security settings.) So anyone who indexes Facebook can get brand page content set to be public (I’m guessing if there’s an age limitation or other filter on this, the post may not be indexed) or any content in a public group or any content set to be viewable by the public.
Unfortunately, this limits what comes out of Facebook in the indexing a great deal. That will always be an X-factor in knowing what people are saying about you online. Facebook is not going to open their content to open indexing.

We recently bought HubSpot, but we compared it to Awareness Networks (and a bunch others).

Shawndrarussell

I’m freelance and manage social media for several clients. I’m happy with Hootsuite but would like to invest in an affordable and more in-depth analysis/measurement tool. Any suggestions? Likely I would continue to use Hootsuite to post & monitor. Also would love to hear a bit more about Bundle & Buffer-like tools. Worth the cost or should I just keep scheduling with Hootsuite?

Shawndra, I think both BundlePost and Buffer are worth the costs. I pay for the “premium” versions of both.

– BundlePost is great because I can go in on a Monday to my favorite blogs, and Google Alert feeds, and pick articles/posts I want to run throughout the week. I can then use HootSuite to upload these scheduled posts to all the profiles supported by HootSuite (Twitter, Facebook, Fan Pages, LinkedIn). BundlePost also allows me to have personal content already loaded in a separate folder, and that could be inspirational quotes, links to company resources, personal blog URLs w/custom “intros”, etc. It even has a separate folder for Follow Friday lists if you participate in that each week.

– Buffer is great for my “as you go” scheduling of tweets/facebook/fanpage/LinkedIn updates. Just because you get time to read over lunch and come across several great articles, that doesn’t mean your followers want to get bombarded with all of that great content at once. Buffer helps you space out those updates throughout the day. I use the Buffer extension in Chrome, and I also use the integration with an RSS Reader called Mr. Reader on my iPad.

As for monitoring, Pulse Analytics (our product, so I am biased) has a more attainable agency model for the analysis/measurement…and it has nice integration with Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and marketing spend to go along with the sentiment analysis. It may still be a little pricey for freelance, but we can discuss further in a separate thread if you want to ask further questions.

Didn’t mean to leave you off, Frank, but again, this isn’t intended to be a list post. “tools like …” preceded everything. Just wanted to invite users in to talk about what they use. Glad Vocus is represented here now, though!

Hi Jason, great effort! We just reviewed a couple of those tools and wrote a blog post about it (incl. infographic): http://www.goldbachinteractive.com/current-news/technical-papers/social-media-monitoring-tool-report-2012
As you can see, we found a couple more interesting tools.

iancleary

Hi Jason, a great post. Here’s a couple more to add to your list
Crowdbooster, Viralheat,social engage, cotweet. There’s more springing up by the day!
Ian

Curious to hear from anyone who has used a variety of listening platforms such as Radian6, Sysomos, Brand Awareness, et al. Specifically, I’d love to know (or be pointed to resources where I can read) how each of their data collection sources catch up.

I’ve been having trouble creating a list of sources each does and does not capture, which is making it difficult to weigh their cost (I’ve been using R6 which is pretty good but darn expensive) versus their functionality.

I’m currently using Sprout Social for monitoring and reporting for multiple clients, but am still pretty reliant on Hootsuite for message syndication because I’m addicted to the column layouts and quick tabbing access between Companies.

Sprout seems to be a little slow so it’s more cumbersome to jump from account to account while doing a quick check-in on everything.I’ll comment on Sprout specifically below as I pay the most for it.

What do you like about the software you’re using? What I love most are the reporting features. The information is a good supplement to the custom reports I create for clients each month, and they have been very well received since adding them 2 months ago.

What do you not like about the software you’re using? As mentioned, I’m still a little stuck on the Hootsuite column layout for quick browsing between accounts and shooting out tweets. Sprout gets a little laggy swapping between Groups. I totally understand it’s more robust and has more to process though.

Are you using more than one of the management or publishing solutions and why? As I mentioned, I’m using Hootsuite Pro for publishing/syndicating some things, and Sprout for follower management, brand monitoring, and reporting. Old habit with Hootsuite publishing. Sprout though is great at monitoring and reporting in a way that is more polished than Hootsuite.

What one function do you wish your platform performed that it doesn’t? I’ve noticed some hiccups in brand monitoring in Sprout that support hasn’t been able to help with at this point. For example, if a Twitter user has a brand name as part of their Twitter handle, it pulls every single tweet in for monitoring when it’s all useless junk.

What other business softwares does your system integrate with and do you use that integration? Sprout integrates with ZenDesk, but I don’t use that functionality.

What other business software would it be helpful for your platform to integrate with that it doesn’t? Not sure at this point.

How easy is your software to learn and use? Very easy- had a one-on-one walk-through and their help system and video tutorials are very thorough.

How easy is your software to manage from an admin standpoint? Very easy. I am a single consultant with a couple of helpers every once in a while based on projects, and it’s easy to add them and assign tasks.

How many people in your organization are using the software? Currently just me. This is why the price point is so critical. The majority of tools are way beyond my single consultant budget, however the ability to access and manage multiple smaller brands at the same time is extremely important to being able to grow my business.

Jason and gang,
I, too, was undergoing the same evaluation a little while back. So a colleague of mine and I put together a spreadsheet for our own internal use. After we made our selection, I thought, “gee, I bet others could benefit from this.” So we cleaned it up and shared it. Here’s the post, and the spreadsheet, if it’s of any use to you or your readers, is available on SlideShare (you can get to it from the post): http://www.subjectivelyspeaking.net/2012/04/05/a-comparison-of-enterprise-twitter-tools/

Great list. I’ve tried many of them. As you say, no tool is perfect and I would have the same reco for every client.
In general though, our netnography work and our client’s ongoing monitoring needs are fairly complex. We’re looking to really dig into the content to find themes, patterns, tidbits of (hopefully!) insight. While we’re tool agnostic and do subscribe to several tools across varying budget levels (including free :), I find that the tool that does the best of what I want is Brandwatch.

So you asked a lot of questions. Here goes.

What do you like about the software you’re using? It allows for extraordinarily precise monitoring and, best of all, very precise data diving & crosstabbing – for lack of better terms.What do you not like about the software you’re using? Don’t have an answer to this. I’m sure there must be something…?Are you using more than one of the management or publishing solutions and why? One of my clients uses Hootsuite for publishing while we monitor with other tools that do have the same capability. They just like tweeting from Hootsuite. While it’s nice to be totally centralized, it’s ok.What one function do you wish your platform performed that it doesn’t? It does everything I currently need for work with my clients. Who knows in the future?What other business software does your system integrate with and do you use that integration? Google Insights. I’m not using it yet, but it’s in the works.How easy is your software to learn and use? Easy to learn and be really productive. As with all the systems I’ve used, really mastering the software and learning to take advantage of all the capabilities takes a bit more time.How easy is your software to manage from an admin standpoint? Very easy. I have a big team using it – my team and client teams. How many people in your organization are using the software? Including clients, close to 50 at this point.

Note: when it comes to free or inexpensive tools, simply measured/rowfeeder is a favorite.

This is a excellent list. I am evaluated all of this tools and they all have their pros and cons. One social media monitoring and listening tool that is awesome is Brandwatch (http://www.brandwatch.com) It has the best real-time data collection functionality that I have seen. It also has incredible reporting functionality.

1) Pricing is ridiculous in this segment. There are $75 tools and $10,000 tools and not that much difference in between. That a social media management platform (one segment of our strategy) costs more than our Analytics which drives most of our online marketing programs is simply ridiculous. Especially given the fact that the platforms are so limited in their tracking and measurement capabilities.

2) We love Hootsuite but it’s ridiculous that they make you use their shortener when we have so many other uses for URL shortening. They should open their app to Bit.ly and/or make a Bit.ly style site and API to integrate with other tools. This BS of not wanting to integrate with anyone has to go.

I use Hootsuite for my publishing and engagement. In some cases, I use some assists to the publishing efforts with products like Buffer, BundlePost and DoShare (for Google+). I also find HootSuite outstanding when participating in Twitter Chats. My typical Hootsuite tab then has Mentions, Sent Tweets, DM (Inbox) and the Twitter Chat Hashtag as a keyword search. Very efficient tool in my opinion.

Regarding the social media monitoring/sentiment analysis “division”, we’ve introduced our own product in the enterprise-space called Pulse Analytics so I definitely have a vendor bias for this category. Even though it is more suited to medium-to-large brands when used in support of a SINGLE brand, we did also come out with agency model pricing to better support the SMBs.

excellent idea putting this together. I use Sproutsocial for professional purposes and Hootsuite for personal things.

Overall, Sprout is excellent. Very robust discovery, posting, and reporting functions. I also love that I can export social data to excel, and how responsive their staff is to any questions or comments I have. Its only real weakness is that it can be quite slow (at least on my old work computer). This is understandable considering it is dealing with a massive amount of data, but it can get pretty frusterating. It also costs money, which is why I use hootsuite for my personal stuff.

Hootsuite is more responsive than Sproutsocial, although it sacrifices accuracy and completeness in doing so. Many times, mentions or retweets will not show up until hours later. It doesn’t have any good reporting features in the free version either, but I’d be skeptical of any free social reporting tool anyways. As far as I’m concerned, it is the best free social management tool out there.

Thanks for sharing your experience with Sprout Social, Ryan! Appreciate the kind words and happy to hear you’re enjoying the app. We’re always making minor tweaks and adjustments to improve the speed, so will keep getting better!

I help a lot of clients work out which tools to use, and we use multiple tools in my practice as well (both bought and built). I keep coming back to the same two concepts:
– It’s either multiple tools, or multi-faceted tools. Think about an enterprise Business Intelligence group – would you only pay for one module of SAS or SPSS? When you bring in something like Crystal Reports, it’s a huge system with many connections to various elements of your business. As social becomes the new normal for the enterprise, your team will either need a lot of different tools to match a lot of different needs, or large enterprise systems will evolve to meet all of your needs with various modules/products. (Salesforce and Oracle are probably closest to making that a reality.) Budget and plan accordingly.

– Choices for teams now are budget driven. Soon, they’ll be business driven. Altimeter’s last report on prioritizing corporate social budgets said the novice social program has about $66K/yr to play with for tools and campaigns. That means you’re going to be lucky to fund one major platform (a Radian6 or Sysomos sized object), plus some tools to plug specific needs, plus your annual campaigns. For that budget, right now most vendors are priced far out of the market. Even though social teams need more capabilities, they just can’t afford most of them right now. However, this will change – we’re already seeing more mature social businesses getting more funds to pursue tools and technologies that will advance their objectives. Smart vendors will bend over backwards to get in and integrated with businesses so that, as they grow, the windfall of additional budget will come to them. Smart vendors will also consider their product suite an evolution of ever-growing capabilities, rather than a huge initial investment for a roughly static product.

Jumping in here, we use Shortstack too – you can build Facebook tabs and promotions pretty simply with drag and drop. Very reasonably priced. Lots of templates to choose from, but obviously best with your own css.

I’d also like to recommend http://www.socialnewsdesk.com. It’s a great niche social media management product for media companies. Learning and using SocialNewsDesk has been fairly easy and it’s been a hit in the KWTX-TV newsroom. We have seen our activity and engagement numbers shoot up since the station began using SocialNewsDesk.

I love the idea for this, Jason.
Obviously my opinions on this matter are going to vastly biased (because I work for the best, Sysomos ;) ), but I will pass this on to my followers and get them to weigh in on our behalf.

Hi Michael! Sorry to hear you’ve been frustrated by Raven. We’re working right now on coming up with better training resources for our customers that I hope will help. I’d love to hear more about what is frustrating and what would help you more. Feel free to email me at courtney@raventools.com if you like. Thanks for the feedback regardless!

Raven replied faster than I did, Michael. So that says something! Good luck working through the issues.

sm417@yahoo.com

Hi Michael, I do work for a small hotel and what I am going through is very similar. I am not finding any good tutorial and find this tool hard to use. I do find it very interesting yet I need to understand how to use it in an efficient manner

Anytime Jason,
I’ve shared it with my followers & I’ll work on getting our team to share it out as well.

When I take off the vendor hat, I still find this to be one of the most polarizing conversations that can be had.

I was moderating a panel discussion in Buffalo and brought up the topic of SMMS tools & Measurement & a few things stuck out.

1. For the average small/media sized business & agency the “enterprise tools” cost too much they do not have the budget to pay above 15k, and if they did it wouldnt be the first spend. In the panel’s POV & the audience anything above $200 was too much to manage followers & posting

2. Confusion on effective KPI’s, there is still a ton of confusion on what really matters between likes, follows, RT’s, pins etc.

3. ROI thought I thought that horse was beat to death, it’s still a huge point when comparing spends in media or ppc/ad words campaign.

this post points out one this very clear. Social is a big Cluster – now which of these platforms provides hierarchical approvals for scheduled content that is under $50/month? Sorry about my brevity . : )

Under $50 per month, Albert? You’re limited to the lower level paid HootSuite and other near free tools, none of which (to my knowledge) have hierarchical approval functionality. You’re asking for the moon for nothing with that kind of feature request, based on my understanding of what the industry offers. Complex functionality is going to cost you $99 per month or more, depending on the specific need, of course.

what? the moon, no no jason, I get Google and Facebook for nothing, what’s a little approval functionality. Really I understand. I’m using Hootsuite Pro, not enterprise which is where that approval function is available. Big brands have no problem with a couple of hundred a month or more for that functionality. it’s a small agency with smaller clients that I’m really looking to see where the bottom price point exists. See you in Minneapolis

You should check out Sendible as we have hierarchy, multi user packages starting at $39.99 or packages for single user that start at $9.99. Not only that but we can set up a custom package that suits the needs of any small agency. I love the blog post Jason and happy to give a demo anytime.
Johnny Costello
Sales & Marketing Manager

Albert – I’ve learned of two solutions coming out that are lower in price point that you’re asking, but neither have the complex functionality of tiered approval. Seems that’s a function that is a cost factor. But It looks like Johnny from Sendible might have an option for you. (Below.)

GreggTilston

$50? $99? We are in the thousands of dollars though we are monitoring for many brands across a dozen countries. Great post btw.

Oh yeah … it starts at $99 per month, but I dont’ know that any solutions that cheap offer the heirarchy piece. They may offer some sort of approval component, though. The cheapest I know is going to be $50 per month per location/page/outpost, but you’re looking at thousands per month for most franchise or multiple department/location businesses.

Albert, Expion will get you under that range for multi location management, customizable interface and it’s all built of hierarchies. Happy to give you a tour and you can let us know how you feel. Feedback is everything and we have global clients at varying levels and pricing.

Erica McClenny
VP Client Services @expion

Caldercho

It’s interesting that very few tools actually go beyond increasing the efficiency of communicating via social channels.

I personally use XYDO for my email communications – not only does it make the channel more effective, it helps solve the problem of ‘what do I actually say?’ Apparently they’re releasing social support very soon under the same platform.